PORT ANGELES — She was known as La Giganta, the Giantess.
This was when 6-foot-tall Erin Jones was a basketball player, coach and team translator in Mexico City — just one of many lives she’s lived.
Jones is the guest speaker who will pay tribute to Martin Luther King Jr. at Peninsula College today.
A teacher honored as a Champion of Change at the White House two years ago, Jones will give a free public lecture titled “Dreaming a Dream that Is Bigger than Me.”
The event, part of the Studium Generale series, will start at 12:35 p.m. in the Little Theater at Peninsula College, 1502 E. Lauridsen Blvd.
Then at 2 p.m., she’ll lead a free workshop, “Making the Dream a Reality,” in the college’s Longhouse of Learning geared toward high school and college students but also open to the wider community.
Martin Luther King Jr. Day is a federal holiday set this year for Jan. 19. It marks King’s birthday, which was Jan. 15, 1929.
King was the chief spokesman for nonviolent activism in the civil rights movement, which protested racial discrimination in federal and state law. He was assassinated in 1968.
Jones’ second visit
This will be the second time Jones has come to Port Angeles.
At the Students of Color Conference in Yakima last year, a group of Peninsula College students who came “just absolutely raved about her keynote address,” said PC professor Kate Reavey.
Jones kept in touch with those students. She attended Peninsula College’s commencement ceremony in June, Reavey added, “so she could support three young women who simply asked her, ‘Would you please come?’”
In Jones’ King tribute, “the challenge for me is that we talk about ‘the dream’” and King’s “I Have a Dream” speech — given nearly 52 years ago.
What does it mean now?
“What does it mean today? What does it mean in our lives now?” Jones, 43, asks.
She’ll explore these topics in her lecture and workshop, along with questions about what “diversity” and “culture” mean in daily life.
“Everybody has culture. How do we unpack [it]?” Jones said.
Born to a white mother and a black father in Minnesota, she was adopted by a white couple who raised her in the Netherlands, where her adoptive father was a teacher at the American School of the Hague.
After graduating from that school, Jones, at 18, moved to Philadelphia for college.
She became a high school teacher. At 28, she went to Mexico to coach basketball. After that, she resumed her education career in Tacoma, where she received the Most Innovative Foreign Language Teacher Award in 2007.
The 2008 Washington State Milken Educator of the Year and the 2013 Champion of Change prize followed.
Now, Jones directs the Advancement Via Individual Determination, or AVID, program in Tacoma, where she works with students who will be the first in their families to go to college.
In her travels, Jones said, she has learned that “there are many different ways to do life.”
She hopes to be a bridge — though “sometimes, you get stepped on, and it hurts” — but that’s how people get to the other side of their struggles.
When Jones arrives here, she won’t come with a prepared speech.
“I kind of go with the flow. I get there early” to see who’s there and have some conversation. Then, “I speak from what’s in my heart.”
Jones added that she may talk about the nationwide protests following the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, unarmed black men who were killed in interactions with police.
As tragic as they are, “these events have opened up a door for us . . . for the nation to be honest in how we think about race,” she said.
“In the last month, we’ve had more open and honest discussions about race than in the last 25 years.”
These interactions can be painful, yes. Yet Jones hopes they can move us forward as a people.
“My goal for my life — my professional and personal life — is to improve education to ensure that each and every child receives an excellent education,” Jones writes on her LinkedIn page.
“I want to inspire others — adults and young people alike — to become their best selves and, therefore, to create the America I believe we were designed to be.”
For more information about Jones’ appearances today, email longhouse@pencol.edu or KReavey@pencol.edu, or phone 360-417-7987.
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Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5062, or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
